Canadiana.org and partners achieve digitization record with 21 million pages

In 2014, Canadiana.org and its partners processed some 21 million pages, achieving the highest output of Canadian historical records ever digitized in a single year.

This achievement builds on the Heritage Project, an effort to make accessible a projected 40 million pages of archival material held at Library and Archives Canada. The completed digital collection, chronicling the institutions and people that shaped Canadian history from the 1600s to the mid-1900s, will be of major research value for scholars in a wide variety of fields.

Since 2013, the project has amassed 30 million digital images viewable on a free website, with the remaining content projected to appear online in 2015. Alongside mass digitization, important work has also been undertaken towards creating linked metadata for search and discovery.

Canadiana.org also expanded its online research resources with an additional 1 million digitized pages of non-archival content, chiefly early Canadian monographs and periodicals (journals and magazines, excluding newspapers). Canadiana.org continues its mission to digitize all periodicals published in Canada before 1921.

Factsheet

 21 million pages is not the highest one-year throughput for mass digitization in Canada; however, it represents the largest single-year haul of historical primary sources whose subject matter and/or origin is Canadian

 Canadiana.org is committed to ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of all deposited content. Source material is processed in scanning centres in Ottawa-Gatineau, with storage of the digitized content distributed across several sites in Canada for safer preservation.